What People Want To Know on WhatDoTheyKnow

mySociety’s flagship Freedom of Information (FOI) request portal WhatDoTheyKnow.com, operating in the UK since 2008, has amassed a whopping 330,000 FOI requests (and counting) from citizens over its eight year life-span.

That equates to approximately 15-20% of all FOI requests made in the UK. It also represents the largest database of FOI requests in the country, having provided a platform for requests and responses to over 17,000 UK public authorities to be published publicly online.

Those are some impressive numbers: however, until now we haven’t known much more about what requests are being made, whether there are trends, or indeed, whether the responses that people are receiving are satisfactory.

We thought it was about time that we took a look under the bonnet of WhatDoTheyKnow to find out the answers to some of these bigger questions.

Authors

Rebecca Rumbul

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mySociety is a not-for-profit social enterprise, based in
the UK but working with partners internationally. We build
and share digital technologies that give people the power
to get things changed, across the three areas of
Democracy, Freedom of Information, and Better Cities.